Amid all the high-pitch noise surrounding a possible trade deal between Washington and Beijing or Trump and Xi frankly, less attention has been devoted to the holes ZTE dug for itself and neglected to fix.

The ZTE corporate governance and senior management debacle should serve as a timely warning for all Chinese companies on the urgency and importance of taking concrete steps to introduce tight corporate compliance guidelines, particularly at a time when Chinese firms are making aggressive overseas investments following Beijing’s decision to launch the One Belt and One Road infrastructure initiative across the planet.

More importantly, the ZTE saga highlights the necessary need to change “the Chinese way of doing business”, which frequently ignores long-term ethics, laws, and regulations in pursuit of short-term profits and KPIs.

Former SCMP Editor-in-Chief Wang Xiangwei has penned a column which hopefully is being widely read in China's elite C-suites. The high-level business class of China needs to decide, are we a Chinese business or are we a global business?